Plantation Enmore was a well-known cotton and sugar plantation in British Guiana, now known as Guyana. Its owner, Henry Porter, arrived from Tobago in 1782 and named it after his ancestral home in England. However, long before Indian indentured laborers arrived on the plantation, Africans were brought to Guyana as enslaved people by the British colonizers to work on sugar plantations along the coast. Plantation Enmore was one such plantation where they endured harsh and inhumane conditions until slavery was abolished in 1834. They still had to work as apprentices for four more years until they were fully freed. After emancipation, many Africans left the plantations and bought their own lands to form villages. One of the first such purchases was made by 83 laborers from five estates – Dochfour, Ann’s Grove, Hope, Paradise and Enmore – who bought Plantation Northbrook for $10,000 in 1839.
To replace the African labor force, the British colonizers brought indentured laborers from India and other parts of Asia. The first ship carrying Indian laborers arrived in Guyana in 1838. They were contracted to work on the plantations for five years and then return to their homeland or stay in Guyana as free citizens. Many of them chose to stay and settled in villages near the plantations. One of these villages was Enmore, which was originally a cotton and sugar plantation. The Indian laborers lived in logies (mud huts) until they were granted plots of land in the late 1940s or early 1950s. However, they also faced exploitation and oppression by the plantation owners and managers.
Although Africans were forced to work on Plantation Enmore before Indian laborers, both groups faced struggles for freedom and dignity and for Africans, a struggle for freedom from brutality. The Enmore martyrs incident is a significant event that marked a turning point in industrial relations within the sugar industry and heralded the improvement of working conditions. Five sugar workers were shot and killed by the police during a strike for better wages and working conditions. The strike was led by the Guyana Industrial Workers Union (GIWU), which challenged the authority of the Man Power Citizen’s Association (MPCA), which was seen as ineffective and corrupt by the workers. The strike also opposed the ‘cut and load’ system that forced cane cutters to both cut and load the sugar punts with cane they cut.
